The present invention relates generally to wireless time division duplex using code division multiple access (TDD/CDMA) communication systems. In particular, the invention relates to determining channelization codes for use in multiuser detection in the downlink for TDD/CDMA systems.
A TDD/CDMA communication system is illustrated in FIG. 1. The system 10 has multiple base stations 121 to 125. Each base station 121 has an associated operating area. User equipments (UEs) 141 to 143 in a base station's operating area communicate with that base station 121. Communications transmitted from a base station 121 to a UE 141 are referred to as downlink communications and communications transmitted from a UE 141 to a base station 121 are referred to as uplink communications.
In a wireless TDD/CDMA communication system, multiple communications are sent in a shared frequency spectrum. One such system is proposed in a third generation wideband-CDMA (W-CDMA) standard. In CDMA systems, multiple communications are sent in the shared spectrum and are distinguished by channelization codes. In TDD/CDMA systems, the shared spectrum is also time divided using repeating frames having a fixed number of time slots, such as fifteen (15) time slots. Each time slot is used to transmit either only uplink or downlink communications. As a result, the communications are distinguished by both channelization codes and time slots. A single channelization code used in a single time slot is referred to as a resource unit. Based on a communications bandwidth, the communication may require one or multiple resource units. Typical data modulation schemes used in TDD/CDMA systems are quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and N Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM), such as N=8, 16 or 64.
Data is transmitted in such systems using communication bursts 16. A communication burst 16 carries data in a single time slot using a single channelization code (a single resource unit). A typical communication burst 16 has a midamble 20, a guard period 18 and two data bursts 22, 24, as shown in FIG. 2. The midamble 20 separates the two data bursts 22, 24. The guard period 18 separates the communication bursts 16 to allow for the difference in arrival times of bursts 16 transmitted from different transmitters. The two data bursts 22, 24 contain the communication burst's data. The midamble 20 contains a midamble code for use in estimating the channel response between the receiver and transmitter.
Since multiple communication bursts may be transmitted in a single time slot, a receiver must be able to distinguish data from the multiple bursts. One approach to recover the received data is multiuser detection (MUD).
In MUD, a receiver recovers all communication bursts' data in a time slot, including bursts transmitted to other UEs. To recover all the bursts' data, the MUD receiver needs to know all of the channelization codes used to transmit the bursts. In the proposed TDD mode of W-CDMA, each UE 141 to 143 only knows which channelization and midamble codes are used for carrying information intended for it. To determine all the channelization and midamble codes, a bank of matched filters is used to detect all possible channelization/midamble combinations. The output power from each matched filter is compared to a threshold to determine whether a particular channelization/midamble combination was used. Due to the number of required matched filters, this approach has a high complexity. Additionally, if there is a high correlation between channelization codes, this approach may have poor performance. Accordingly, it is desirable to have alternate approaches for UEs 141 to 143 to be able to determine the active channelization codes.